This months gradPsych

[Ollie123]

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Two interesting articles that might be worth discussing:

1) Internship...and what to do about it. Apparently the wheels are in motion on this one and there is a giant effort to help new schools form their own accredited internships and to try and convince a certain few, unnamed schools to start having standards and stop letting 500 students in every year😉 Will it work? Do we need to do more? My (vastly unpopular I'm sure) solution would be to tell schools that until they stop letting in so many students, their current students aren't allowed to participate in the match. Or they could just cap the number of students from any individual program allowed to enter the match.

But I'd be interested to hear what those with less harsh a view than me think are realistic alternatives, since mine are half-jokes I realize will never happen.

2) Traditional dissertations vs. alternative formats:
I'd be especially interested in the opinions of those of you who either are going through this right now, or have in the recent past. Do you think its a reasonable solution to allow multiple publishable studies to replace a traditional dissertation? Personally I always found it ridiculous to have students spend such a vast amount of time on something that will have to be completely reformatted to be published anyways. When Psych Bulletin says your lit search is too thorough and your manuscript is too long, something is wrong😉 That being said, I'm not there yet so maybe there is some value to writing THAT thorough of a paper I'm just unaware of. Do you learn the field better than you would from writing multiple "normal" papers for journals in that field?

Post your thoughts, let's get some discussion going🙂

 

[JockNerd]

1) Internship...and what to do about it. Apparently the wheels are in motion on this one and there is a giant effort to help new schools form their own accredited internships and to try and convince a certain few, unnamed schools to start having standards and stop letting 500 students in every year😉 Will it work? Do we need to do more? My (vastly unpopular I'm sure) solution would be to tell schools that until they stop letting in so many students, their current students aren't allowed to participate in the match. Or they could just cap the number of students from any individual program allowed to enter the match.

Put programs with low match rates (let's set an arbitrary number of 60%) over a period of four years into accreditation warning status. Four years to regularly place over 60% of students or accreditation is removed. Problem (mostly) solved. Crappy programs need to be held accountable for admitting students, running off their money, and then not matching half of them.

2) Traditional dissertations vs. alternative formats:
I'd be especially interested in the opinions of those of you who either are going through this right now, or have in the recent past. Do you think its a reasonable solution to allow multiple publishable studies to replace a traditional dissertation? Personally I always found it ridiculous to have students spend such a vast amount of time on something that will have to be completely reformatted to be published anyways. When Psych Bulletin says your lit search is too thorough and your manuscript is too long, something is wrong😉 That being said, I'm not there yet so maybe there is some value to writing THAT thorough of a paper I'm just unaware of. Do you learn the field better than you would from writing multiple "normal" papers for journals in that field?

My god do I agree. Dissertations seem totally useless to me (though if someone can think of one please let me know). I think a publication in a top journal should be able to take the place of at least a Masters thesis, and PhD projects should be written ready to submit (though defenses shouldn't be made easier because of that).

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

I am all for throwing any program at 60% or lower on probation and infarct them in some way. It really is unacceptable to allow that to happen on a consistent basis.

As for the dissertation piece, I would like to see required research match what is required in published journals, because isn't that what we are really striving for? I've seen some work that throws everything and the kitchen sink in, but in reality large portions would get hacked out for publication. With that being said, if people want to look at all sorts of stuff...that is great, but more doesn't equal better.

-t

 

[psychanon]

I'm all for the internship part.

For the dissertation bit...I don't think so. There's more to a dissertation than producing a publishable paper. It's really about designing a whole study from start to finish, proposing it to your committee and justifying your decisions to experts in the field (or making changes based on their feedbacks), and then, ultimately, defending the finished product. All of these steps are things that you will have to do, in some way, shape, or form, throughout an academic career. The expanded lit review is important because you need to develop a really thorough understanding of the background literature in your research area-- to the point where you can legitimately call yourself an "expert" in the field, because that's what the Ph.D. signals. Even doing several papers really doesn't equate that, because each paper could only provide a shallow understanding of the topic.

On the other hand, I don't think it's necessary to produce 200 page dissertations, and most people don't. I've read a lot of dissertations from various universities for my research, and they vary tremendously. Some are 150 pages, with tables of conducts, 10 appendices, etc. Some are basically normal papers, with somewhat expanded detail. I think the latter is more appropriate. Unlike in, say, comparative literature, the laborious part of doing a psychology dissertation should not be in doing the writing. It should be in generating the idea and collecting the data (because in my opinion data collection is inherently laborious). The paper just kind of writes itself (i'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me there, and granted I haven't finished my diss yet, but that's my experience based on my proposal, etc.).

 

[Ollie123]

Interesting, glad you posted that psychanon🙂

Feel the need to clarify this for the record since I realize I left alot out in my original post - based on what I read in the article, students are still expected to design their own studies (or multiple studies) from start to finish. It sounds like these studies are expected to be of the same caliber as a typical dissertation project, and UCLA doesn't seem like the sort of school that would let low quality students graduate with a PhD😉

I think the discussion was actually primarily ABOUT the writeup of the dissertation. In other words, instead of writing a 150-200 page dissertation, students submit the dissertation in what you'd expect of say a J. of Abnormal submission (just an example). Given your opinion on the actual writing being the easier part, would it change your view at all? If the question is not the size/quality of the project but about the end-product being 2 20 page manuscripts ready to be submitted the day the committee okays them instead of a 150 page dissertation, do you see a problem with that (based on your last paragraph, it doesn't sound like it).

 

[psychanon]

Hmm. If they're simply talking about whether or not dissertations need to be 200 pages, then yeah, I'd agree that they shouldn't have to be long for the sake of being long. They'd probably have to be longer than a J. Abnormal paper, because committees usually want to see lots of detail on the methodology (to be sure there are no problems), that results are similar using different analytical approaches, and that all the relevant literature issues are presented. Committees want to see more detail than reviewers because unlike journals, there are no space limitations to worry about. For most dissertations, this can probably be accomplished in 50-80 pages. Note that J. Abnormal's limit is (I believe) 9,000 words, which translates to about 35-40 Word pages incl. tables, refs, etc. In contrast, review journals like Clin Psych Review have a limit of around 50 pages. 9,000 words would really be too short for a dissertation-- it'd be OK for a MA thesis, but you just couldn't squeeze a diss down to that. By the way, it is a lot more challenging to keep papers short than to make things long. I've never had a situation where I've needed to lengthen a paper (in fact, it's never a bad thing to send in a paper that is a bit lower than the page limit), but pretty much every thing I've ever written has needed to be edited for length.

 

[LM02]

Just wanted to pipe in with psychanon - to a certain extent, some departments have already done away with the 200 page dissertation (though, in some cases, it may fall down to the advisor's preference).

For example, my dissertation was 67 pages - with the enormous left-side margins for binding, and that also included all of the other nonsense like the signature page, acknowledgments, etc. So, in other words, it was an empirical paper with an expanded lit review and expanded methods section. It wasn't too hard to whip it into shape for submission... most of my classmates had similar dissertation experiences.